—how is he still
awake?

OCTOBER 14:
KIM SEOKJIN

==

three days after meeting jeongguk, two days after yoongi is released from the hospital, and one day after jimin finally allows the others a peek at taehyung's old adidas, seokjin swears that kim taehyung is playing tricks on his brain.

it starts when he decides to read the newspaper from namjoon's jacket after days of procrastination (more like reluctance, in all honesty, and it's pretty obvious considering the fact that he's the last one to read the article). seokjin is at home after a long—and extremely difficult, since his manager wasn't exactly too happy with his employee missing three consecutive days of work—shift, even including a few hours of street-side singing, feet on his shabby desk and body utterly depleted.

and likewise, he can't bother namjoon and all the others. they've got their own agendas making up lost work shifts, missed college classes, get togethers with worried friends and phone calls from protective family members. all six of them have been swamped up to their chins with workloads over the past few days. and yet, seokjin has no problem continuing to find taehyung and bring him back. it's strange.

he sits up and sighs, pulling out his rugged laptop—a shabby, but well appreciated, gift from one of his former bosses. tucked into the laptop's case is the newspaper from a week back, manila ends wilting at the sides and old ink blurring against the pages.

seokjin grimaces as he reads the article, wetting his lips and furrowing his eyebrows.

"shit, that's graphic," he mutters.

he flips through the newspaper with lazy eyes, thumbing through the pages and over boring articles, sighing as he finds himself right back at the front page. as he stares at the daunting, bold words of taehyung's headline, seokjin feels his head begins to swim.

"fuck," he mutters, leaning back into his chair with a squeak. it doesn't make sense. how would this newspaper, the one which somehow disappeared from namjoon's desk weeks before with a paperweight in pieces, wind up randomly in his jacket days later?

kim taehyung, maybe. and it isn't be a long shot to assume so. he was there at the scene—exploding cars and growing talons, but nevertheless he was there—, and it wouldn't be incredulous to assume he has the capability to pull of a stunt like that.

but that's the thing.

"the kid was trying to kill us, not help us," seokjin whispers, rocking his chair. "christ, which side are you on, taehyung?"

something catches the corner of his eye on the newspaper, halting his movement almost automatically. seokjin takes the paper in his fingers and squints around the front page, and that's where he finds it.

inconspicuously, in the corner of the paper, circled so carefully and closely you would have to be looking for precisely it to find it, is the date.

seokjin squints. march twenty-fifth of the year prior, barely circled in with the faintest indent, as if someone had taken a dirty nail and drawn an oval around the month and day.

but that's it. that's all that caught his eye.

seokjin curses faintly under his breath, taking strands of his hair between his fingers and just venting. "it's nothing," he mouths through gritted teeth. "there's nothing, fucking nothing, how the hell are we supposed to find this guy? does he even want to be found? he finds us first, and then he turns psycho, and then he says something insane, and then runs away, shit, what does he want from us?"

no, that isn't the question. what does the monster from all those years, cultivated by taehyung's fear and then things no one has ever known, want from them?

he finally stops from frustration, pushing himself from the desk and dragging his feet to the kitchen. one of the lightbulbs is dead and continues to flicker over the stove, and at this point, seokjin has stopped bothering to remind himself to fix it. it's not like he has the money to, anyway.

grabbing a half-empty beer from the fridge, seokjin turns to the almost empty counter, save for the plastic bag containing taehyung's shoes leaning against the old microwave.

"fuck you," he says loudly, glaring at the shoes. his words aren't directed to taehyung, but, in actuality, he really doesn't know nor care who receives them. at this point, cussing out a random stranger on the side of the street seems like a fascinating concept.

you're a mess, kim seokjin.

he really is.

it takes a three, four, then an extra fifth sip of beer for seokjin to sigh and walk to the bag of shoes. pulling the plastic away from the sneakers, he blankly stares at the well-kept adidas.

aside from the blood stains, of course. how'd they even get blood on them, anyway? it all just baffles him.

seokjin stares a bit more before walking back to his laptop and lazily opening a chrome tab, finger hovering without incentive over the central mouse pad.

doesn't hurt to do some random research.

so he does. he looks up the name of the newspaper, which yields nothing, then to the actual "circled" date, which yields nothing (well, aside from the fact that apparently a huge celebrity scandal occurred, but that's besides the point), then to sunab city's wikipedia page which clearly won't yield anything and, surprise surprise, it doesn't.

seokjin sighs. guess i'm just not destined to figure out shit, huh. no wonder i couldn't even complete college, i'm just a dumb bastard.

he scoffs bitterly.

after a bit more reckless searching, seokjin winds up on sunab's subway transport page, primarily to look for the infamous, taehyung-exploding-a-train video that's been plastered across headlines for several days. he does eventually find it, but replaying it five times doesn't help him one bit, resulting only in goosebumps arising up the entirety of his arms.

replaying it a sixth time, however, does allow him to find something.

it's minuscule, actually—he isn't quite sure why it catches his attention—, but right before the subway explodes, right before taehyung turns up to face the grainy security camera and gives the sweetest sinister smile, right before everything impossible becomes possible, the destination sign over the train's head switches to useol city. and it's almost as if taehyung's hand is gesturing right at that sign.

and it's routine, of course. seokjin knows this from what jeongguk told him a few days back when the six of them went to grab lunch together. subway 301 stops—or rather, stopped—at several joint cities before eventually reaching useol city through an intricate series of subway points, essentially giving a clear way to useol (if you were willing to spare eight hours of travel and wait time, of course).

seokjin doesn't know why it bugs him so much. okay, and? so the subway taehyung blew up had a main stop of useol city. and that affects the situation how?

he grabs the newspaper out of instinct, examining the date.

march twenty-fifth.

seokjin stops rocking his chair.

3/25. and he remembers.

"oh my fucking god, that's it."

seokjin scrambles to his laptop again and quickly types in a jumbled question into the search bar, how far is useol from sunab, fuck his typos, they don't matter right now—

and then he finds it.

"useol is located three hundred and twenty-five kilometers away from sunab," seokjin mouths out, jaw trembling in absolute shock. "oh my god. 325."

seokjin looks at the paper again. and the more he looks at that intended, circled date, the more he looks at the way taehyung's is practically pointing to the sign above the subway, the more it looks so urgent, so planned, so obvious.

there's something in useol city. something that's been there from the start.

and seokjin doesn't know how, he doesn't know why, but kim taehyung is giving clues in plain sight to find it.

==

this took three dr peppers and procrastination on a huge bio packet to write lmao it's Lit!!!
and yes yes useol is seoul wit the words jubmbled up,, again,, and i hate myself too
(and ye if you look it up seoul nd busan are 325 km apart)
but!! i !! love you have a wonderful day!!!!